I don't suppose you know or care who Uwe Boll is. In a way you're lucky, he's the world's worst director.
Way back when he first came onto the scene, I was a young, angry teenager who may or may not have considered himself a "gamer" and I hated Uwe Boll with the rest of them. He made most of his money and infamy making low-budget, hideous videogame adaptations. They're universally terrible and we hated him for treading on the sacred grounds of Alone in the Dark and Dungeon Siege.
Eventually, though, something changed. First off, people weren't even hating him for the right reasons. Most people, having no knowledge or understanding of tax laws or the German legal system started accusing him of being this Goldfinger-like genius who could manipulate tax breaks in his favor. In reality, he was just using a rather silly law-- one that's pretty common in Europe-- that basically subsidized his film. It was perfectly legal and rather mundane, but the internet hated him.
As time went on, I still hated the guy, but he kept on popping his head up and making movies. He must have known how much we all hated him, but he didn't seem to give a flying fuck about us (smart man), he just kept on filming movies.
Later he challenged his detractors to a boxing match. He gave them a chance to beat him up for all of the harm he's done to our precious non-culture. Many accepted. As a result, he knocked the shit out of critic after critic. A bunch of the victims complained that it wasn't fair, that he had been a boxer for years and they were just snarky movie critics. They knew all of that and yet they-- and others-- bitched about how he duped them.
A few years back he appeared at the Penny Arcade Expo-- a gaming convention centered around the eponymous webcomic-- and he appeared to talk about his movie. The entire time he was speaking, he was being booed. Such was the gaming community's hatred for the man. They weren't even going to let him testify before they condemned him to death. The kernel of respect I had for the man-- hack though he was-- was born on that day. He had the balls to stand in front of hundreds of cussing, angry, sweaty people and talk about art.
Eventually I stopped giving a fuck. He was a bad director. There's lots of them, but in a way I respect the fact that he's doing what he wants no matter how many people tell him to stop. And he's not raping children or anything, he's making shitty movies. That's hardly a capital offense. Through all this, though, he never stopped doing what he wanted to do-- which was not to cheat the German tax system.
I really like that interview. Yeah, he's an asshole and a hack, but he's doing what he wants. As a guy who wants to be a professional artist of sorts, I can respect that. Someone is always going to hate you for what you do, but the only real response you can have is to keep on moving forward.
Which is probably the most profound thing Uwe Boll has ever been involved in.
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